Whaddaweknow? Language Awareness and Non-linguists' Accounts of Everyday Speech Activities

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the willingness and ability of non-linguists to provide information about 'what they know' about everyday speech activities, in the form of their interpretive responses to various tape-recorded fragments of talk. Three types of information are identified from these responses, including overtly 'available' information about a variety of surface linguistic matters. The vocabularies used to describe these matters are then discussed in the light of different modes of folk-linguistic awareness, as recently expounded in this journal by Preston (1996). It is argued that these modes serve to reveal elements of interpretive capacity that must emanate from knowledge about the systematic properties of language, and knowledge about how these properties are realised in actual language use. As such, they can not only contribute 'common-sense' or 'real world' insights into the nature of human communicative behaviour, by serving to complement or warrant particular analytic claims, but also help to redress the widely held and unflattering view of the lay person as 'an imperfect scientist'.